4. VMware’s stock market value is very volatile. There is no guarantee the stock value won’t drop another 40% in the next months. Check the graph. You don’t have a point here.

1. Kuznetsky’s “simple diagram” contains application virtualization. There is no such thing. However, the diagram shows the area where hardware virtualization comes in. That’s vmware, Xen, kvm amongst others. Hardware virtualization is just that; it acts as more hardware than you actually have. What more does vmware deliver exactly?

2. Your examples are on a different level than hardware virtualization. As little you would care if you have HP or Dell stuff to run Oracle on, you wouldn’t care about your hypervisor brand. The only thing needed is a company that does the installation for you, who will be responsible for maintenance. Like RedHat. You will find that whitin a couple of years, hardware virtualization is a commodity.

3. Implementation costs are comparable in vmware cases. The licenses for free are free. How does xensource/xenserver and kvm lack scaling?

5. What?
No Vmware is not dead and will be around for a long while, but it will be of much less value than it is now.